by Guy James
It didn’t take him very long to realize what was happening. The stopped cars around the truck were no longer inhabited by their early-rising owners, but by what the vegan could only interpret to be ghouls.
It was the apocalypse. The dead were walking the Earth, perhaps in atonement for their flesh-eating sins—not that the vegan harshly judged the flesh-eaters in his normal life, but on this apocalyptic day, the thought occurred to him.
So he ran, and when he was too tired to run, he walked. As the day wore on, he noticed that the ghouls grouped themselves, and when he passed the groups, they began to shamble toward him.
Even in his spent state, it was easy for the vegan to keep away from them. They were slow, and he was very light and nimble.
The ghouls were not the ones that had hurt him.
It had happened after he had dared to sneak into an Exxon for some cigarettes. He smoked constantly as he made his way up the road, and when he saw the Exxon, he didn’t want to waste the opportunity to stock up. The place looked deserted, and the nearest ghouls were more than a block away, shambling toward him at a snail’s pace. It seemed like a good idea. What could go wrong?
So the vegan crept under the portico and around the pumps, pushed the door of the Exxon’s convenience store open, and nervously walked in.
His suspicions had been correct. The place was empty.
Bolstered by his apparent good luck, he climbed over the counter into the attendant’s spot, and found his preferred brand of cigarette—Lucky Strike—the only brand worth smoking. He was just tucking the second carton of Luckies under his left arm when the sound of shattering glass startled him, and he was covered by a sideways spray of shards.
He flinched, instinctively raising his arm to cover his face, but the sharp spray abruptly ended. The vegan inspected himself, and found that the glass-breaking had left him unscathed.
With his heart pounding and an unknown culprit lurking somewhere close by, the vegan climbed back over the counter as quietly as he could, trying to avoid cutting himself on the shards of window glass that were scattered everywhere. He set himself down and began to tiptoe to the door, wincing at every scrape of glass under his feet.
The vegan had just placed his hand on the door when a gruff, drawling voice called from behind him.
“Hey you, skinny boy, where do you think you’re going?”
The vegan turned and saw a tan, obese man, clad from head to toe in leather. His fat, bald head was covered with a bandana that bore a burning skull featuring fiery eye sockets.
Confused and unsure of how to respond, the vegan just shrugged.
“Don’t you know stealing’s wrong? Just because the world’s about ended don’t make it alright. Don’t you know nothing?” The leather-clad man’s voice contorted with each word, and the vegan found himself growing more and more uncomfortable with every twitch of the man’s leathery face.
The vegan resolutely pulled the door open and stepped through it, out under the portico. “I just...”
The leather-clad man began to trudge toward him, at a surprising speed given his size. “You just nothing. Now hand over those cigs.” The man extended a fat, leather-gloved hand that seemed to want to burst. The vegan now saw that in the harasser’s other hand was a tire iron, probably the thing he had used to break the window. “Now if you had taken some Twinkies or beef jerky or something, I might look the other way. You ever eat? You could use some food. But cigs...especially those—” he pointed a pudgy finger, “—those are for real men.”
The vegan clutched the Luckies tighter and began to back away.
“You stay right where you are,” the leather-clad man said, raising the tire iron in a menacing gesture.
The vegan wasn’t going to do any such thing. He quickened his backward steps, and he was just about to turn and run when his right foot caught on the raised curb that led into the convenience store.
He sprawled onto the ground, twisting on his back. The vegan got his feet back under him to spring up and begin running, but the leather-clad man was already there, apparently having trundled over at a blinding speed.
The tire iron came down in a flash of tarnished silver, and the vegan felt it strike his thigh above the knee. There was no crack, but the dull pain shot downward, creating an agony of feeling in the vegan’s knee, shin, and ankle.
Terrified, but still clutching the cigarette cartons, the vegan crawled backward to get away from the man and his tire iron. He got to his feet through the pain, and began to run.
“Yeah you better run,” the man called after him. “You better be faster than that if you want to live through the day. You ain’t no real man.”
The vegan shot a glance backward to make sure the man wasn’t coming after him, and he wasn’t. The harasser stood there in his leathers, continuing to bellow at the vegan, but not leaving the shade of the Exxon’s portico.
The vegan turned back and kept running until the man was well out of earshot. His leg hurt like hell, and although there had been no crack on contact, the vegan felt the pain of the blow in his bone.
After running a few blocks, he slowed down and settled into a quick limp that lessened the pain considerably. At least he still had the cigarettes, which he could easily have lost in the encounter. He wasn’t sure how he’d held on to them, but apparently his body knew its priorities and had put the cigarette cartons into a death grip, and had kept the death grip even in the face of a tire iron attack.
That was some consolation. The vegan continued to look back throughout his journey, watching for the hefty trundle of the man in leather, but it never came. After some time, the vegan decided that the ghouls had taken care of the man, and the vegan fingered his cross once more.
The vegan shook his head. And now here he was, at another inauspicious intersection, exhausted, hungry, hurt, and with nothing to look forward to except the cigarettes. But that was as good a nothing as there could be, so long as it could be enjoyed in safety.
He looked both ways before starting across the intersection, noting that he wasn’t looking out for the flow of traffic, but for ghouls and hidden human miscreants.
The ghouls, he had gathered so far, had no penchant for trickery. Seemingly unable to hide or stalk their human prey, the ghouls made their presence known far in advance by their obtrusive moans and odd, uncoordinated gaits.
He felt a familiar stinging pain in his fingers as he was crossing the intersection. The cigarette, which he had smoked down to the filter and forgotten to throw away, had burned down even further, down to the vegan’s well-stained, cigarette-heat-tempered fingers. He flicked the cigarette away without a second glance.
As he crossed, he kept a watchful eye out for the cars nearest him, most of which held ghouls, apparently and inexplicably trapped in their cars. They stirred as the vegan passed.
They probably want me to let them out, he thought. Fat chance of that...although, if the man in the leathers were here, I might just do that...let them out and see who was faster. But the vegan knew the fat man would probably escape. He was shockingly fast in his movements.
The vegan crossed all the way and looked back. He didn’t have a watch, but he knew by the sun’s movement through the sky that he’d been walking most of the day, except when the sudden downpour had forced him to stop. It had truly been a storm of biblical proportions, and the vegan had ducked into an abandoned strip mall coffee shop in which he cowered and smoked until the storm passed.
I’m limping my way through hell, he thought, and wondered if there was going to be an end to all of this. Was he in purgatory or in some undefined sort of limbo? If this was hell, why wasn’t anyone around to give him a tour? The vegan remembered Darren, a taunting meat-eater who always said, “Vegans go straight to hell,” and, “Vegans are in league with Satan.”
Having gone through the two packs he’d started the day carrying, the vegan broke in one of the boxes of Luckies, as he wondered if Darren had been right.
With his left eye and right corner of his mouth twitching in time, he tried to guess how far he now was from the Wegmans up the road. His home was too far, but the Wegmans...that might be a good place to hide for a while.
Chapter 87
The door slid shut behind Sven.
The shotgun pulled at the muscles in his right arm and upper back. It would have been alright, but his chest and neck were throbbing, shooting fresh bolts of pain into him with each step. He tried steadying the thing with his left hand and repositioning it in front of his body, but that only changed the direction of the pain.
On the day he needed it most, his body wasn’t cooperating. He had been just about crushed, of course, but he expected some more adrenaline in a situation like this, something to dull out the pain and help work through it. Apparently, Sven’s adrenaline supply was spent.
Now, walking into what he knew was a zombie trap waiting to be sprung, the adrenaline wasn’t kicking in...and what if it didn’t kick in when the zombies showed themselves? That wasn’t something Sven wanted to think about, and it wasn’t something he would allow.
“They’re all over the meat section,” Brian said. “It’s really disgusting. They’re...well...you’ll see.”
“Give me a second,” Sven said, not daring to imagine what Brian was referring to. “Just give me a quick second.”
“I too must gather myself,” Milt said, resting his great body on some sacks of red potatoes. “The air conditioning in this facility is quite refreshing.”
Sven nodded in his direction. The man was acting strange, but he could be forgiven under the circumstances. Milt, after all, had come in to help with cleaning out the inside of the Wegmans, and that earned him the benefit of the doubt in Sven’s book.
The three men faced the expanse of the produce section. A long row of checkout aisles, accompanying cash registers, and shopping carts were to their left. The deli section and in-store cafe were to their right. The aisles that made up the bulk of the store were sectioned off to the left of the produce section, and Sven could only see their entrances and wonder what lurked within them.
“I’m fading,” Sven said, feeling the day’s exertions sapping his strength. Then he saw what he needed.
Sven did all he could to avoid stimulants. As a bodybuilder, the elevated cortisol levels and adrenal fatigue that came with stimulant use were things to be avoided, except in certain, very precise pre-competition stages.
But he made exceptions. One was long drives for which Sven needed to keep his mind alert. Another, apparently, was a zombie outbreak.
Sven strode to the cooler that marked the entrance to the first checkout aisle. He put all thoughts of muscle breakdown out of his head and pulled the cooler door open. It was full of energy drinks, as he had expected. He glanced at the variety in the cooler with distaste.
There was Red Bull, Surge, Amp, Starbucks and a number of other products Sven wasn’t familiar with, except to the extent that he knew to avoid them. He considered resigning himself to drinking cold water, but that wouldn’t give him the zombie-killing jolt he now needed. Sven’s eyes settled on a drink, and he pulled it out of the cooler.
He rested the shotgun on top of the cooler, then opened the drink. Sven took a sip of the Starbucks Double Shot. Then he took another. Then he gulped down the remainder of the can’s contents and withdrew a second can. He downed the second one in three gulps, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Ivan meowed, apparently disapproving of the beverage.
Sven put his surgical mask on.
“Would you be so kind as to fetch me a Coca-Cola beverage?” Milt asked. “I trust there are some in yonder miniature refrigerator.”
Sven nodded, pulled out a bottle of Coca-Cola, and tossed it underhand at Milt. Milt clasped his hands together in an attempt to catch it, but missed the bottle completely. It hit the ground and rolled away from the big man on the red potatoes.
“Here,” Brian said. “I got it.” Brian got the bottle and handed it to Milt, who was muttering strings of long words about his failed attempt to catch the bottle.
While Sven waited to feel the energy drink’s effects, Brian visited the cooler, withdrew a bottle of water, and drank it.
“Still keeping healthy?” Sven asked. “Even today?”
“Always,” Brian said. “Especially today, gotta be at my best.”
Sven began to feel a jittery energy work its way through his body. He felt slightly less depressed now, and his mind began to click away at a rapid pace. It was time to clean this place up.
He picked up the shotgun and rested it on his shoulder, completely disregarding one of the main points of Jane’s gun safety lecture. “Let’s get this over with.”
Brian led the way, taking them up to the end of the produce section, which terminated into a bread section. Between the end of the produce section and the bread section was a gap that looked out onto refrigerator islands and wall refrigerators filled with dairy products.
“There,” Brian said, and pointed to the right, past the dairy islands, “they’re all in the meat section down there.”
Sven looked, but couldn’t see any zombies from his angle. There were noises coming from the area to which Brian was pointing—sloshing, churning, and ripping noises, and Sven could easily imagine what they meant.
Now feeling the full onslaught of adrenalin from the energy drinks and his fear, Sven took the shotgun off his shoulder and held it diagonally in front of his body, pointing up and to the left. “I’ll open up on them with this...and...” Sven wasn’t sure what came next.
Ivan meowed.
“And we’ll have your back,” Brian said, giving the baseball bat a swing.
“Agreed,” Milt said, removing his ridiculous-looking sword from its scabbard.
Sven’s only consolation at that moment was the presence of the machetes on his belt. If he got into a jam, or if the theorized shotgun assault didn’t take care of business...there would be the long, wooden-handled, wondrous—
He shook the thought off and walked out through the gap between the produce and bread, making no effort to conceal his presence...and then he saw them.
Chapter 88
Sven understood at once what the noises were. The zombies were chomping, munching, crunching…
It was utterly disgusting. Sven felt the Starbucks beverages rumble in his stomach as he stood there, transfixed by the zombies and their attack on the raw meat.
“That is a decidedly revolting vision,” Milt said, coming up behind Sven. “If I may be permitted to say so.”
“Yeah,” Brian said. “Disgusting. Just how I left them.”
Sven didn’t want to come any closer, but he made himself approach so that he would have a better shot. He drew nearer, measuring his steps and raising the shotgun at the same time.
There had to be at least twenty of them, huddled around the meat refrigerators, ripping at all the raw flesh they could get their gnarled hands on. They pushed the shrink-wrapped pieces of meat at their mouths in feverish uncoordinated movements. Their arms and bodies jerked violently as they reached, grabbed, bit, slurped, and chewed. Their heads and necks were the worst to look at it—contorting with each snap and slurp and—
Sven had to turn away for a moment, on the verge of being sick in his surgical mask. The sucking and slurping noises were getting deep under Sven’s skin, making him nauseated in the core of his bones.
He didn’t have to listen to it much longer, however, because the zombies perked up and seemed to forget about the meat as soon as he turned back.
They turned to him, blood-stained faces splattered with bits of raw meat and gristle and bone, their mouths hanging askew, still full of half-chewed pieces of meat that were apparently forgotten in Sven’s presence.
There was a tall one at the front of the pack, closest to Sven—it had to be over s
ix and half feet tall. It slowly lowered a shrink-wrapped piece of meat from its lips. The meat looked like a pork chop that had been gnawed in the middle, through the shrink-wrap.
The towering zombie’s arms jerked downward, hands losing their grip on the packaged meat. The pork chop plopped to the floor, meat-side down. Then the zombie’s head cocked to one side with a crunch, setting itself at an inhuman angle. Its eyes snapped open wider to gaze at Sven.
Ivan hissed and began to claw urgently at Sven’s shoulder. Sven barely felt it. There may have been shouts from behind him—from Brian and Milt maybe—but Sven could barely hear them now. It was just him and the zombies…all those hungry zombies, slurping at the bloody meat, drinking the—
Sven jerked his eyes away from the tall one at the head of the pack. He looked at the rest of the zombies, now watching him with the intensity of a collective predatory being. Their black eyes seemed to open even wider to take Sven in, to the point where he thought the dead eyes were so loose in their sockets that they would tumble out. But the eyes flopped in place, held there by some rotten fleshy wire that Sven didn’t want to imagine.
The zombies began to move toward Sven, lurching and bobbing like a floating mess of rot. He could smell them now, the gut-wrenching, overpowering, nauseating, mesmeriz—
He pulled the trigger. The shot ripped through the air, shotgun jerking backward into Sven and sending pain into his chest.
Holes appeared in the tall zombie, the focal points of suddenly visible fissures in the zombie’s t-shirt. Then the tall one’s midsection seemed to cave in on itself and the zombie toppled forward, jaw snapping shut for the last time.
Two of the zombies behind their towering leader had also been hit by the scatter, but they continued in their dogged shamble toward Sven.
Sven took a deep breath through the stifling surgical mask, stepped back, and pumped the shotgun. He shot, pumped and shot, pumped and shot, pumped and shot, pumped and…nothing.